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Connections‬
January 28, 2001-- Fourth Sunday of the Year
"No prophet is accepted in his native place." Luke 4:21-30
The onion woman
Once upon a time there was a wicked peasant woman. When she died, she did not leave a single good dead behind, so the devils took her and plunged her into a lake of fire.
Her guardian angel stood and tried to think of some good deed she had performed so that the angel could plead for her before God. Finally, he remembered something; it was not a very big thing, but it was something he could bring before God.
"She once pulled up an onion in her garden and gave it to a poor beggar," the angel said to God.
God answered: "Very well. Take that onion, hold it out to her in the lake of fire, and let her take hold of it and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Heaven. But if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is."
The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. "Come and catch hold and I'll pull you out." And the angel began to carefully pull her out by the stalks of the onion. He had just about pulled her to safety when other sinners in the lake of fire saw how she was being drawn out and tried to catch hold of the onion so that they, too, might be saved. But the wicked woman began kicking them off. "I'm to be saved, not you!" she screamed. "It's my onion, not yours!"
As soon as she said that, the onion broke, and she fell back into the lake. All her guardian angels could do was weep and walk away.
[From The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.]
CONNECTION: In today's Gospel, Jesus emphasizes the generosity of God to those outside the Jewish community, that all men and women of every race and nation are loved by God as his own children. It is a message that comes as a shock to his Nazareth hearers, who consider Jesus' words betrayal and blasphemy. Like the wicked onion woman, they are too absorbed in their own needs and too fearful for their own safety and security to even consider that the blessings and goodness of God transcends their own limited image of the holy. Jesus begins his ministry among us with a new vision of God that strikes down the image of God as intolerant judge of wicked humanity and upholds the God of love and forgiveness, the God who is Father and Mother of every human being. v
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